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Research Facilities

The graduate student experience is enhanced by the presence of Centers of Excellence in biology and medicine on the Davis campus. These unique resources provide laboratory space, interdisciplinary research opportunities and clinical resources for research. Following are descriptions and links for important organized research units and centers.

CNPRC - The California National Primate Research Center investigates selected human health problems for which the nonhuman primate is the animal model of choice. Research programs include developmental and reproductive biology; infectious disease, including SAIDS; respiratory diseases; primate medicine; and a variety of biomedical collaborative research projects. Operation of the center is supported by a grant from the National Institutes of Health and other grants and contracts from a wide variety of extramural sources.

CCM - The Center for Comparative Medicine is a joint project of the schools of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine. Housed in a new state-of-the-art research building, this program is a self-supporting research facility dedicated to understanding the pathogenesis of human and animal infectious diseases.

CAHFS - The California Animal Health and Food Safety Laboratory System is a statewide diagnostic laboratory system with a central reference laboratory located in Davis and four branch laboratories located in Fresno, Tulare, Turlock, and San Bernardino.

VMTH - The Veterinary Medical Teaching Hospital provides clinical case materials and an innovative clinical database on naturally occurring diseases in a wide variety of animal species. Case materials are used to advance the knowledge of clinical veterinary medicine, particularly with respect to causes and mechanisms of disease, and for development of innovative means of prevention and treatment of disease.

VMTRC - The Veterinary Medicine Teaching and Research Center in Tulare, California provides animal health services to commercial dairy, beef, swine, and sheep enterprises. The VMTRC serves as a focus for consultations about food animal problems for central and southern California.

UCDMC - The UC Davis Medical Center is one of five University of California teaching hospitals. As the primary clinical education site for the UC Davis School of Medicine, and the only area provider of many medical services, the medical center is an integral part of the health and well-being of Northern Californians. UC Davis Medical Center is located on 140 acres in central Sacramento, three miles from the state capitol and twenty miles from the main UC Davis campus.

CCAH - The Center for Companion Animal Health, funded by private donations, provides support for research that benefits the health of small companion animals (including dogs, cats, caged birds, and companion exotic animals). Located next to the Veterinary Medical Teaching Hospital, the center provides laboratories, surgical sites, treatment and procedure rooms and animal wards for a variety of cancer, infectious disease, nutrition, medicine, and surgery investigations at a basic science, preclinical, and clinical level.

CEH - The Center for Equine Health is the umbrella under which equine research is funded and conducted at the School of Veterinary Medicine. Investigators from institutions of higher education with formal equine research programs in California are eligible for support. The CEH supports research in stress and performance, including orthopedics; reproduction and neonatology; and diseases of horses, including nutrition. The CEH is located on a sixty-acre site. Facilities include numerous barns, pens, portable stalls, and paddocks along with irrigated pasture. Up to 300 horses can be maintained at the CEH.

CFAH - The Center for Food Animal Health is an organized research center for the School of Veterinary Medicine. This program serves as the veterinary medical component of the Agricultural Experiment Station. Its purpose is to organize resources for and conduct research on animal diseases that are important to livestock industries, the environment, important food-borne and vector-borne disease problems, and zoonoses associated with diseases of livestock critical to California.

WHC - The Wildlife Health Center focuses on research to address current problems that threaten free-ranging wildlife populations. The center provides support to approximately thirty faculty members from various campus departments who have a common interest in wildlife health. A clinical research facility provides unique animal holding, treatment and survival surgery facilities. It also will permit immediate and long-term investigations involving sea birds. In the future, the facilities are to be expanded to include care of mammals.

CHE - The Center for Health and the Environment is housed in a cluster of specialized laboratories. The institute serves as the focus for research programs concerned with biomedical and toxicological problems related to exposure to chemical, physical, and biological toxic agents found in the environment or at the workplace. Studies on toxic, mutagenic, carcinogenic, and teratogenic compounds are carried out in special animal holding facilities. The following facilities are associated with CHE.

The Bodega Marine Laboratory, located on Bodega Head, about one hundred miles from Davis, supports basic and applied interdisciplinary research and teaching activities devoted primarily to the study of marine ecosystems. The laboratory property, a protected biological refuge, is part of the UC Natural Reserve System.

The Comparative Cancer Center brings together human and veterinary medicine to solve the most intractable disease problem of our era, combining clinical investigations of cancer therapy with research into the mechanisms of the neoplastic process in specific animal and human tumors. The center maintains a variety of radiation and chemotherapy units and provides an intramural funding resource for investigations.

The Biotechnology Program offers short courses on various techniques used in biotechnology research. These courses can be taken as electives in the basic curriculum or, in aggregate, can provide a designated emphasis in biotechnology as part of the Comparative Pathology degree.

MBP - The Mouse Biology Program is a campus initiative capitalizing on using the mouse genome in comparative medicine. In concert with the western branch of Jackson Laboratories and the Center for Genomics, the Mouse Biology Program provides crucial infrastructure for understanding the genetic basis of disease.

CLAS - The Center for Laboratory Animal Sciences provides care, housing, and treatment for all laboratory animals for the campus. CLAS offers valuable animal diversity and serves as a model of excellent health care given to all animals at the facility.

Peter J. Shields Library, the main campus library, is a predominately open-stack library that contains more than 2.5 million volumes and receives more than 40,000 periodicals, serials, and government publications annually. Its holdings in the physical and biological sciences and agricultural sciences are outstanding and there are strong collections in the humanities, social sciences, and fine arts. The use of most library materials has been made easier by a computerized control system. In addition to the collections and facilities of Shields Library, there are branch libraries for the health sciences (approximately 187,000 volumes) and the physical sciences and engineering (approximately 177,000 volumes and 718,000 research reports of the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and other governmental agencies).

Laboratory Facilities

Graduate students primarily learn current techniques for research in the laboratories of their major professors. Some of these are in or make use of specialized research facilities. Brief descriptions follow.

FAI - The Facility for Advanced Instrumentation provides and maintains major equipment, including transmission electron microscopes, scanning electron microscopes, mass spectrometers, a programmable spectrophotometer, image analyzing systems, and ancillary equipment. FAI staff members train participants in research groups who have not had experience in preparatory techniques and instrument operation and are also available as consultants and troubleshooters for research projects.

The Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Facility has sophisticated nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectrometers that allow users to conduct a variety of research projects: 500 MHZ Omega, 300 MHZ Omega, 400 MHZ Bruker AMX, 2T CSI, and 7T Omega. Some current research areas include protein structure function, metabolic regulation, diffusion and transport phenomena, and imaging of blood flow and tissues. The facility staff is highly trained in NMR research and provides consultation and advice to help researchers achieve their NMR research goals.

Advanced Light Source at Lawrence Berkeley Lab (a sixty-minute drive from UC Davis) is available to provide very bright, spatially coherent radiation that can be used for photoelectron spectroscopy, for scanning x-ray microscopy, or to provide picosecond pulses of ultraviolet light for studying the kinetics of chemical reactions. The exceptional brightness of the ultraviolet radiation allows useful photoelectron signals to be generated from areas only 500 atoms in diameter. From a scan with a focused beam across the surface, spatially resolved photoelectron spectroscopy is possible, thereby revealing the location, as well as the type, of process occurring there.

This page last updated August 2008

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